Apate.ai says thousands of AI agents posed as scam victims, logged 2.5 million conversations

Apate.ai says it has deployed thousands of AI agents to pose as scam victims and that those agents have carried out 2.5 million conversations, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. The startup presented the numbers while participating at TechCrunch Disrupt and said the interactions have collectively 'wasted 17 years of scammers’ time.'

According to TechCrunch, Apate.ai was founded in 2024 out of research at Macquarie University in Sydney and now operates a fleet of simulated victims that mimic ages, genders, accents and languages to keep fraudsters engaged. The company described the agents as an intelligence-gathering tool that records scam tactics and conversation patterns for its clients. TechCrunch reported that banks, telecoms, government agencies and utilities are among the organisations using Apate.ai’s intelligence to detect fraud and inform defensive measures. The article quotes the company saying client organisations have routed calls to Apate’s agents; one example the company gave was that TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate’s agents. Apate also told TechCrunch that an unnamed Australian bank used outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns and that a client named Commonwealth has seen a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses. The TechCrunch story placed Apate.ai’s claims alongside statistics about AI-enabled crime: it noted the FBI received more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025 that resulted in about $893 million in losses, with investment scams accounting for more than $632 million of that figure, according to the article. Apate.ai’s pitch to investors and potential customers, the article said, is that its agents can both consume suspicious inbound contact and proactively disrupt fraud operations. TechCrunch reported that Apate.ai employs about 20 people and has raised just under $10 million to date, and that the company plans to spend its latest round on product work and international expansion, specifically opening an office in London and growing its U.S. presence. Apate presented its technology and metrics to venture-capital judges at Disrupt, the article says. Mezha.net published a headline reporting the same deployment of AI agents to pose as scam victims and gather intelligence, corroborating that at least one other outlet covered Apate.ai’s claims. Beyond Apate.ai’s self-reported figures and client examples cited by TechCrunch, independent verification of the 2.5 million-conversation total and the claimed aggregate time wasted for scammers was not provided in the article.